5 march 06

In light of the recent decision by the U.S. to assist India in developing nuclear energy I remembered images made in June, 2001 at the Hanford Nuclear Reactor when I lived in Richland. An engineer friend invited me out for a comphrensive 4-hour tour when the reactor was "down" for maintenance as they replaced cooling rods.

We visited all levels of the facility; control rooms, labs, turbines, an overview of the open reactor, waste containment areas, energy conversion and transmission lines to Seattle. In addition to generating nuclear energy, Hanford stores 53 million gallons of toxic waste. It is one of the world's most polluted sites.

The Energy Department manages cleanup at the contaminated Hanford site, created in the 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Cleanup costs are expected to total $50 billion to $60 billion and the work to continue until 2035.

But the department and its contractor have been harshly criticized for their roles in building the vitrification plant, which is being designed to treat highly radioactive waste left from decades of plutonium production.

The images were initially published on the "Hanford Watch" website and they are included here in a new gallery.

Their link is below with recent media articles on Department of Energy cost overruns and the political debate regarding cleanup expense and long range health and environmental implications.

..."Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen. An atom of normal hydrogen has one negative particle, called an electron, and one positive particle, called a proton. An atom of tritium also contains two neutral particles, called neutrons. These extra particles make the tritium atom unstable and cause it to emit a very low-energy form of beta radiation."

"Beta radiation is a type of ionizing radiation. Ionizing refers to radiation that, when it passes through matter, has the potential to strip away electrons. When it passes through a human body, it can produce permanent changes in cells. There are three principal potential health effects: cancer, genetic effects and effects on fetuses," - Savannah River Site (SRS)

Hanford Watch

3 mar 06

As you may know from personal experience or through Travel Tales, Marrakesh is a magical place. In MK 3 & 4 podcasts we talked about exploring, writing and witnessing the vibrant Moroccan life.

We suggest if Morocco and specifically Marrakesh, calls you, get there in this life time. Wander through the maze of mysterious and delightful sensory magic.

It's all storytelling and here's a link on the dying art form from the IHT for your pleasure.

It also mentions an important writer, Juan Goytisolo, who speaks the local Arabic dialect and has lived in Morocco since the 70's. You may enjoy reading his little book, "The Garden of Secrets."

Peace.

Last of the Bards

2 March 06

Greetings,

After reading about the wedding and funeral image experience in MK 14 a friend in Chengdu shared a Chinese saying, "Marriage is the tomb of love."

As we reported from the Mesapotamia front lines way back when, the number of military veterans (19%) seeking mental help is growing faster than you can say, "Kill them all! Fire first and aim later for God's sake! You'll never take me alive! I'll be damned if I'm going to perish in this wasteland."

Therapists and divorce lawyers have noted a sharp uptake on their intake road load.

Shirley You Must Be Joking, a registered stress professional said, "Yes. It's true I'm afraid. I'm afraid we are witnessing a vast conspiracy to hide the reality. Denial is a way of life here. They come in screaming, 'Not Me!' and "Why Me?" and we give them drugs or, if you prefer the politically correct word, Happy Pills. I am constantly living in fear and it's a scary thing, let me tell you."

"This fear based perception has been developing over time," said Robert Robot, an enlistee from Big City, and a refugee from Nigeria where petrochemical conglomerates screw the local people to make huge profits.

"Let's not beat around the Bush. I'm afraid the light at the end of the tunnel is made of transparent ideology imported from Crawl Daddy," he whispered to a naked truth lying in shadows.

As he spoke, 22,000 men, women and children suffering from post-tramatic stress syndrome lined up for their weekly injection of peace and harmony in the key of C.

This statistic does not include more than 400,000 Iraqi citizens suffering from nightmares, flashbacks and delusional thinking, "Is today the last day I will see my husband, wife, children, relatives and friends?"

Love is in the air. Run for cover.

26 feb 06

Greetings,

MK 14 is up for your listening pleasure. We asked classes this week, "What's the difference between "hear" and "listen"? The consensus was that listening is a process and hearing is a result. Interesting. Or as someone once said, "How can I know what I think until I see what I said?"

So maybe I should say, "Thanks for hearing MK 14." Maybe one is passive and the other active. Or, as someone said, "I don't have a listening problem, I have a hearing problem."

Funny how we rely on sense data which at best is filtered through various personal bias and beliefs, speaking of data mining which is what the super secret intelligence agencies do using a giant vacuum cleaner manufactured somewhere over the rainbow, according to reliable sources who, for the sake of their lives, demanded to remain obscure at an undisclosed location in a small lab near a swan infested lake teeming with wild trout.

In other news Oregon Literary Review published three Tibet images and some words in their Winter/Spring 2006 issue.

Also, here's a quote about blogging we found interesting....As Ana Marie Cox says: “When people talk about the liberation of the armchair pajamas media, they tend to turn a blind eye to the fact that the voices with the loudest volume in the blogsphere definitely belong to people who have experience writing. They don’t have to be experienced journalists necessarily, but they write - part of their professional life is to communicate clearly in written words.”

And not every blogger can be a Tom Paine. “People may want a democratic media,” says Cox, “but they don’t want to be bored. They also want to be entertained and they want to feel like they’ve learned something. They want ideas expressed with some measure of clarity.”

The old joke says when an English writer finds success they get a new typewriter. An American writer gets a new life.

Peace.

Oregon Literary Review